A Mobile council member says the city needs to develop a plan to address public safety concerns that dominated council discussions throughout the latter half of 2023.

Councilman Cory Penn, during and after Tuesday’s council meeting, said the plan would aim at crime prevention while focused on “creating success for your young people.”

He announced his proposal two days after a fatal shooting occurred in downtown Mobile following midnight on New Year’s Eve, the second time in a row in which a shooting occurred on Dauphin Street during the city’s annual festivities.

“We have to start somewhere,” Penn told reporters after the council meeting. “If we don’t do anything, then nothing changes. A plan helps start something. We have to come together to create change.”

A spokesman for Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson’s office said they were unaware of Penn’s interest in developing a public safety plan.

“We are open to getting more information and working with Councilman Penn,” said spokesman Jason Johnson.

The plan’s development could take months, and Penn likened it to a similar plan he helped craft for a neighborhood within his council district called the “Toulminville Toolkit,” a 161-page document that lists seven priority topics for a historic neighborhood that is 96% Black. The priorities included topics such as having strong community resources for vulnerable groups, improving infrastructure, and ensuring a safe community.

“We just created the plan for Toulminville, and I believe we can do the same thing for addressing issues here in our community,” Penn said. “There are so many programs already being offered in our city that no one knows about.”

Rev. Marvin Lue, senior pastor at Stewart Memorial CME Church, and a member of a committee that is looking to provide input on police policies and practices, said a documented plan is need for public safety in Mobile.

Lue said the committee is planning to host a peace forum on Jan.13, two days before Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The forum will focus on listening to the city’s youth about their hopes and concerns.

“The more voices at the table, the better so we can really create that one voice that says, ‘enough is enough,’” Lue said. “Peace must be the plan of the day and (a written plan) that says how we orchestrate that in our interactions with one another and with our interactions with law enforcement.”

He added, “something tangible and realistic and long overdue that is inclusive of everyone.”

New Year’s Eve violence

The comments and interests in crafting a plan come as Mobile police continue to investigate the shooting that occurred within the 300 block of Dauphin Street. The shooting occurred 16 minutes after midnight. A 19-year-old man, who police have not yet identified, was shot and killed. Police have not made any arrests, and there were no updates into the ongoing investigation on Tuesday.

The shooting early Monday occurred one year after 23-year-old Thomas Earl Thomas Jr. fired a gun equipped with a “Glock switch” into a crowd of New Year’s Eve revelers, killing one person and injuring nine. He has since been sentenced to 10 years in prison – the maximum allowed under federal law – for possessing a machine gun. Additional state charges are pending.

The shooting early Monday occurred about one block from last year’s shooting.

Penn and other Mobile city officials said little about the investigation but did stress that both shootings were unrelated to the MoonPie Over Mobile festivity that occurred blocks away from the 200 and 300 blocks of Dauphin.

“It had nothing to do with the event,” said Penn, who attended the MoonPie festivity featuring musicians celebrating hip hop’s 50th anniversary followed by the descent of a 600-pound illuminated MoonPie from the side of the RSA Trustmark building.

Council President C.J. Small added, “The MoonPie Drop was a successful event despite what happened afterward. It was great to have a successful evening with nationally known artists inside the City of Mobile.”

MoonPie Over Mobile attracted 11,250 revelers, according to a Mobile police estimate. That figure is substantially lower than previous years when an average between 30,000 to 40,000 people attended the event.

Carol Hunter, spokeswoman with the Downtown Mobile Alliance, said her organization will have its attendance figures available soon for the Sunday night event. She said if the Mobile police estimate is correct, it would indicate a much lower crowd size than last year’s event which drew over 36,000 attendees.

“The weather effects attendance, and the headliner effects attendance, so it’s hard to know if any one thing affected attendance,” Hunter said.

Police activity had also been stepped up as well as a result of last year’s shooting. The Mobile Police Department announced last week that it had allocated additional officers, including traffic, bike, horse-mounted, and foot patrols as well as undercover officers to the event. Uniformed officers, police also said, were to be “highly visible” throughout the night.

Councilman William Carroll said the visibility of the police was not a problem.

“Our police presence was really increased,” he said. “Our ability to stop an individual from doing something out of hate … I don’t know how you address that. But as far as having the resources to prevent it, we were prepared.”

Heightening tensions

Penn’s interest in crafting a plan also comes at a time of concerns over violent interactions between Black residents and police and the tensions that have surfaced in the city over the past couple of months.

Police had four fatal encounters with residents, with two occurring during a raid of a residences in which police were searching for someone else than the person who ended up shot and killed. The most recent incident occurred in November, prompting Stimpson to call for a halt of most pre-dawn police raids after a 16-year-old boy was shot and killed while police executed a search warrant stemming from a marijuana-related investigation.

The most high-profile incident occurred on July 2, after 36-year-old Jawan Dallas died after an encounter with Mobile police that resulted him being struck by a Taser multiple times. Investigators have since ruled out any wrongdoing by the police, claiming that Dallas died from natural causes and that he had drugs in his system. But Dallas’ attorneys who have since viewed the body camera footage of the altercation, say he was “murdered” by police similar to how George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.

A civil lawsuit on behalf of the Dallas family against the City of Mobile was filed early last month in federal court.

The City Council is considering whether to vote on two ordinances, both which address police policy on the release of body camera footage and prohibiting no-knock warrants and pre-dawn raids.

The Stimpson administration has suggested that the proposed ordinances be forwarded to Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office for review after representatives with the Police Department said the council had not authority to pass ordinances regulating them. Some council members, including Small, say they would prefer the issue be resolved in a courtroom than by the Attorney General.

“I really believe there is too much tension from people who mean will from all sides,” said Lue, saying that crafting a public safety plan will help bring multiple parties together on a shared issue. “But if we’re coming from a confrontational mode, nothing will be able to work.”